INTRODUCTION
Theology often hides itself in plain sight, especially in stories designed to entertain. Jurassic Park has captivated generations through the wonder of resurrecting extinct creatures and the thrill of scientific possibility. But this wonder serves as a veil. As readers and moviegoers, we are so consumed by the spectacle that we risk missing the worldview quietly being assumed beneath it all. That worldview is one in which the universe is not governed by providence, but by chance. Survival is preeminent here, not a moral order sustained by God. “Life finds a way” becomes the guiding mantra that masquerades as inevitability. The philosophical underpinning of the novel (although less explicit in the film) suggests that life is self-directing, unstoppable, and that order will emerge without moral oversight or divine care.
This theological review invites the reader to look again. It welcomes a reconsideration of how Crichton’s story replaces the doctrine of divine providence with a godless philosophy that feels compelling precisely because it appears so natural. This review is essentially saying, “This story catechizes us while we’re distracted.” Come and consider how godless explanations are often disguised as humility, but quietly displace God while claiming only to describe the way the world is.
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THE SEDUCTION OF SPECTACLE: WONDER WITHOUT WISDOM
Wonder is not a vice. Wonder is one of the most natural responses to the created world a creature can have. Astonishment is the proper posture of humanity before mountains, oceans, lightning, and living things. The Psalms are full of this. David marvels as he considers the order, scale, and beauty of the heavens (Ps. 8). Scripture celebrates God’s ongoing care for the earth (Ps. 65) and calls people to worship God because He has made everything (Ps. 95). Psalm 148 invites everything, both heavenly and earthly, to praise the Creator. Scripture encourages, even commands the cosmic chorus to universal praise. Being moved by God’s glory in creation is a feature, not a bug, of our humanity.
Scripture only scolds the heart when wonder becomes disordered, when the creature receives what belongs to God alone, and gratitude is replaced by a desire to possess, manage, and display.
That is where John Hammond is instructive. Hammond doesn’t passively appreciate wonder, but seeks to engineer it. He manufactures amazement as a product and then treats the emotional reaction it produces as its own justification. The ethical question is bypassed because the effect is so powerful: Did you see their faces? The look of awe is the moral justification. And because the story is built to make us see those faces too, the reader is subtly trained to evaluate the project by the same metric.
Wonder, which is that innate internal response to God’s glory and goodness in creation, is turned to spectacle, which is that curiosity that scatters the soul.
Augustine is deeply suspicious of spectacle, especially public entertainments (theater, gladiatorial games etc.). In the Confessions, (especially Book X) he treats spectacle as part of curiositas, a kind of restless, undisciplined desire to see and experience things for stimulation rather than truth. For Augustine, spectacle draws the soul outward into surfaces and novelties by exciting emotion without yielding wisdom. Spectacle fragments the attention span which weakens the interior life, simultaneously feeding pride, distraction, and passivity.
Spectacle then, is that which captures the eye but empties the heart.
One watches, consumes, and then moves on, unchanged except perhaps more restless. Spectacle delights in being moved rather than being transformed. And this is the first spiritual danger presented to us in Jurassic Park: a novel. Hammond is not a vulgar, crude, or shallow thrill seeker. He doesn’t want gladiatorial bloodlust, rather, he wants childlike awe of first sight, which is iconically staged in Jurassic Park. The park is framed as educational, uplifting, and even moral. Hammond insists that the dinosaurs are not monsters but are marvels. He sees himself as the benefactor of this childlike wonder. From Augustine’s standpoint, this makes Hammond even more dangerous because he isn’t tempting us with vice, but with misdirected virtue.
Augustine’s objection to spectacle is not mainly what is seen but how and why it’s seen. Hammond believes that wonder is morally self-justified. Augustine would insist that wonder must be ordered, or it becomes another form of distraction. In Jurassic Park, wonder is engineered, scheduled, and framed for consumption. Thus, awe is detached from responsibility, risk, and creaturely limits. It is the viewer that remains sovereign, and the park exists for us. This kind of delight is a desire that is untethered from truth and humility. Detaching wonder from limits is one of the chief concerns Dr. Ian Malcom who finds Hammond’s attempt naive, foolish, and above all else, arrogant. We will comment on Dr. Malcom’s worldview later, but for now, his ongoing tension with Hammond throughout the story maps almost perfectly onto Augustine’s anthropology. Hammond finds Dr. Malcom insufferable, because Dr. Malcom consistently holds to Hammond’s attention that which he cannot see for himself. Namely, that limits are not obstacles to wonder, but are its foundational principles. To exceed limits without humility is to mistake power for wisdom. Hammond throughout the story consistently treats limits as technical problems and as a result, he replaces moral restraint with redundant systems that assume control is a legitimate substitution for reverence. Augustine helps us name what the film dramatizes but never fully articulates.
Spectacle is wonder emptied of humility and placed at human disposal.
”Life Finds a Way”: From Observation to Metaphysics
What I am doing here is not adding theology to Jurassic Park, but simply exposing the theology that is already there. I am not accusing Jurassic Park: a novel of bad intentions, but merely showing how stories teach us what to assume. The worldview of the story is understood by considering the meaning of the stories repeated mantra, “Life finds a way.”
This begins as a modest scientific observation that refers to biological resilience. But as the narrative unfolds, and especially through Ian Malcom, that phrase quietly and decisively mutates. Observation mutates to necessity, what happens becomes what must happen. Probability evolves into destiny wherein contingency is smuggled into inevitability, and humility metamorphose into metaphysics. What sounds like epistemic modesty, (“we can’t control this”) hardens into a claim about how reality itself works. By the end of the story, the phrase is divorced from biology and is the underpinning philosophy of the cosmos. That is the genius, and the danger, of Crichton’s move. It presents itself as anti-theological. It claims humility by rejecting purpose, intention, and moral order. In doing so, it replaces God with something else. Life is self-directing and order somehow emerges without a governor, while correction occurs without judgment. The world of Jurassic Park is one where there is providence without a Provider and order without an Ordainer. The claims are metaphysical but are cloaked in scientific restraint.
Dr. Ian Malcom is crucial to the story because he functions as the story’s moral voice while quietly evacuating moral categories. Dr. Malcom is framed as a kind of prophet who warned them, as the outsider who sees through ‘the illusion’ as it were. He is the one character that isn’t seduced by the wonder, serving as a voice of restraint inside of a world that is drunk on power, and innovation. What’s interesting is that Ian never condemns creation without God. He condemns control. His consistent charge against Hammond is not that he crossed a moral boundary or that he attempted to what belongs to God. Instead, it’s a charge of arrogance, assuming control over complex systems, and the charge of ignoring inevitability. Arrogance in Ian’s framework is not a moral offense against an order upheld by God, rather it’s an epistemic failure, a miscalculation.
In Ian’s model, things go wrong because complexity was underestimated, not because a boundary has been crossed. Disaster demands recalibration, not repentance. Ian’s critique leaves no room for guilt because guilt requires a moral order that can be violated as well as a Governor who can offended. Chaos corrects without judging and life adapts without condemning. What remains is a universe that absorbs catastrophe and then moves on. Survival is a substitution for meaning, while continuation replaces accountability. In this world, history doesn’t unfold toward judgement or restoration. It just continues. The mantra “life finds a way” becomes a way of explaining tragedy without assigning blame and enduring consequences without confronting sin.
“Let’s be clear: the planet is not in jeopardy. We are in jeopardy… we haven’t got the power to destroy the planet or to save it, but we might have the power to save ourselves.”
This statement completes the metaphysical shift that has been unfolding throughout the novel. By insisting that the planet itself is beyond both salvation and destruction, Malcolm removes creation from any moral horizon. The earth neither suffers nor answers, it only endures. What remains in jeopardy is not an order that can be violated, but a species that may fail to adapt. Responsibility is narrowed to self-preservation, and the highest good becomes survival rather than faithfulness. Even though the language of “saving” is retained, still, it is emptied of judgment and redirected inward. Humanity is no longer a steward or sinner, but a clever animal navigating risk. The cosmos requires no repentance, history bends toward no reckoning, and catastrophe demands no confession, only adjustment. In this vision, the doesn’t need redeeming, and therefore neither does the story. There is nothing to be reconciled, only something to outlast.
A World Without Redemption?
To the question “Does the world need redemption?” is inseparable from “What kind of creature is man?” And “What kind of order is the world?” A story that denies the need for redemption has already answered both of these questions incorrectly. Ian’s posture feels modest, we cannot control, we must respect complexity, we are small etc. His diagnosis is true, but his cure is insufficient. Humility is not knowing one’s limits in the abstract, but is knowing oneself as a creature before God. When Malcom removes God from the equation he’s collapsed humility into a kind of epistemic modesty (we don’t know enough) rather than moral dependence (we are not our own). The exchange of submission for uncertainty is clear, and uncertain cannot bear the weight of moral life.
In Jurassic Park, “Life finds a way” becomes a rival doctrine of providence which insists that while contingency is real, secondary causes are real, but nothing is self-directing in the ultimate sense. The novel presents a creation that governs itself. This is the ancient error of attributing divine functions to impersonal forces, such as: fate, nature, chance that Augustine names in The City of God. This is misplaced worship. A world where “life finds a way” without reference to God is not less theological, it is simply theologically misdirected.
A world that does not need redemption does not know what it means to be fallen and a humility that refuses God is still pride because it refuses grace. A story that ends in survival can never offer rest.
Ironically, Ian’s rejection of control still centers humanity. Why? Because even when humans cannot rule the world, they still imagine themselves as the measure of meaning, i.e. the planet is fine, we are the problem, we must save ourselves. This is still anthropology without God.
A Garden without Covenant, A World without Rest
A world without providence can survive, but it cannot rest. A garden without covenant may astonish but it cannot heal. Where providence is replaced by inevitability, humility is collapsed into uncertainty, and stewardship gives way to mere endurance. Jurassic Park leaves us with creatures who adapt and systems that reset, and a world that continues, but never one that is reconciled. In the end, the tragedy of Jurassic Park is not that the park fails, but that it succeeds in imagining relations without redemption. Eden without God is not paradise recovered, but would be institutionalized restlessness. A story that ends in survival alone can never offer the creature what is most needs which is not merely to live, but to dwell.
